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Lab-Grown Tissue Repairs Knee Cartilage

Newspaper current event by Brandon on 06 July 2006, tagged as medical and bio

For the first time, tissue engineering has been successfullly used to repair knee cartilage. Cells donated by twenty-three patients were grown on lab scaffolds made from hyaluronic acid and then implanted back into the patients' knees. After more than a year, the tissue had successfully matured - even in patients with osteoarthritis.

Researchers used two methods to study the maturation of the cartilage: injecting antibodies attached to a fluorescent dye and amino acid analysis. 'In both tests, in just under half the patients, the team found all the hallmarks of natural mature cartilage.'

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More tissue engineering by Brandon :: NR9

It seems tissue engineering is all the rage these days. Another article on NewScientist.com is reporting on mice eggs that have been frozen and matured in the lab which then successfully resulted in offspring. Interestingly, the researchers used alginate – an ingredient in ice cream – to mimic the support that follicles get in the ovary. From the article, '[T]he technique could one day make it possible to freeze immature human eggs in a similar way to sperm, allowing women undergoing cancer treatment to retain eggs to be matured and used in later life.'

Posted 06 July 2006, Hide, Reply
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We kneed this! by Liz_Miracle :: NR5

I can only hope that this technique will be implemented soon. This find can be passed along as savings to the taxpayer in the form of decreased length of stay/no stay for hospital patients.

Patients suffering from osteoarthritis are often plagued by the chronic need for anti-inflammatory medication in order to make it through the day. This in turn causes gastro-intestinal bleeds in many and even stroke in some. This new technique might eliminate this dependency resulting in less hospital admissions.

In addition this procedure could be preventative decreasing the need for total joint arthroplasty's later in life. Not only that, but it would hopefully be an outpatient based procedure (not requiring a hospital stay) and therefore cost less money to taxpayers footing the bill for those on medicare/medicaid requiring hospital stays for this procedure.

I guess for now we'll just have to take our cartilage supplements.

Posted 06 July 2006, Hide, Reply